According to Wikipedia, fiat money is any money that has been declared by a government to be legal tender. Or, more interestingly:

A coin containing valuable metal may be considered fiat currency if its face value is defined by law as different from its market value as metal.

And to think I only ever thought of J-Lo whenever I heard the term "fiat." :)

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Coldblooded Statisticshttp://www.bernzilla.com/2014/02/14/coldblooded-statistics/
http://www.bernzilla.com/2014/02/14/coldblooded-statistics/http://www.bernzilla.com/2014/02/14/coldblooded-statistics/#commentsFri, 14 Feb 2014 19:00:34 GMT
I read an interesting article this morning about algorithms that attempt to predict conflict and revolutions. Having an obvious interest in predictive algorithms, the main premise of the article was more than enough to pique my interest. However, I found an anecdote in the article about how computers immediately outperformed CIA analysts in predicting future turmoil particularly fascinating:

Why was it so easy to beat the CIA's best analysts? To some extent, the answer has more to do with humans than machines. Imagine the agency's Indonesia expert, for example. He wants to make accurate predictions, but he's also subject to a range of biases that never show up in the data. He wants his work to be exciting and relevant, earning the attention of his superiors; he wants Indonesia to be important in the world. Predictions are also used to direct resources within the CIA, and he may want to attract more of the resources than the Indonesia bureau would otherwise receive. By the time all the biases are accounted for, he's doing only slightly better than a coin flip. The statistics, on the other hand, don't have to worry about internal politics or hurt feelings.

That last line is great (because it's so true), and certainly adds some color to the whole debate about computers and technology taking over jobs we are used to being associated with humans.

On February 5, 2014, my family and I braved the 20-degree winter weather to join over 750,000 Seahawks fans celebrating our team's dominating victory over the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII. Despite the cold, it was a beautiful day in Seattle and I can't imagine a better behaved crowd, especially at that size.

I debated titling this entry "Seattle Seahawks Super Bowl Parade," but then decided I better add the date since I hope to be writing about another one next year. Go Seahawks!

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The Seattle Seahawks are World Championshttp://www.bernzilla.com/2014/02/02/the-seattle-seahawks-are-world-champions/
http://www.bernzilla.com/2014/02/02/the-seattle-seahawks-are-world-champions/http://www.bernzilla.com/2014/02/02/the-seattle-seahawks-are-world-champions/#commentsMon, 03 Feb 2014 06:28:36 GMT
I've been watching the Seattle Seahawks play since I can remember. My grandpa was a huge Seahawks fan and I remember watching games with him in the mid-80s when I was only five or six years old. When we weren't watching the games, he was throwing passes to me in his front yard and I was doing my best to emulate my favorite player, wide receiver Steve Largent. Though I didn't quite grasp the concept of the Super Bowl back then -- any ordinary game was exciting to watch at that age -- I grew up learning to appreciate how that game is the pinnacle that all teams and players strive to reach.

That being said, the irony isn't lost on me that I now have a five-year-old daughter (not to mention my soon-to-be three-year-old son) and am only now getting to experience what has up until today been elusive -- a Seattle SeahawksSuper Bowl win. Just as my kids are learning -- through the repeated cheers of my wife and I -- the names of players like Russell Wilson, Richard Sherman, "Beast Mode" and the newest coach to bring a winning attitude to the franchise, "coach Pete," I am finally realizing the joy of my lifelong favorite team getting recognized by everyone everywhere as the best team in the world. What a feeling! Sure, the six-year-old version of me would have been proud of the 2013-2014 Seattle Seahawks no matter the outcome of tonight's game, but the thirty-four-year-old version of me is reflecting on decades full of losing seasons, seasons that seemed cursed and that close-but-no-cigar season eight years ago and realizing that this is what I and the city of Seattle have been waiting for for what feels like forever.

We did it, grandpa. We're world champions.

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Music on YouTubehttp://www.bernzilla.com/2013/12/24/music-on-youtube/
http://www.bernzilla.com/2013/12/24/music-on-youtube/http://www.bernzilla.com/2013/12/24/music-on-youtube/#commentsTue, 24 Dec 2013 21:43:23 GMT
Despite my obvious attempt at doing so, I can't put into words how wrong it is that in 2013 so much music is shared and consumed on YouTube. Someone, somewhere...please fix this.]]>
Persisting Local Environment Variables When Running sudohttp://www.bernzilla.com/2013/12/23/persisting-local-environment-variables-when-running-sudo/
http://www.bernzilla.com/2013/12/23/persisting-local-environment-variables-when-running-sudo/http://www.bernzilla.com/2013/12/23/persisting-local-environment-variables-when-running-sudo/#commentsTue, 24 Dec 2013 03:09:30 GMT
At work I ran into a situation where I needed to be able to set a local environment variable and still have that environment variable be accessible when I ran various scripts with sudo privileges. After researching the issue as I normally do, I realized that while the information is out there, buried and unfortunately veiled in various forum responses, there really isn't a clear and concise explanation of how to achieve such a thing.

I run Linux Mint, which is very similar to Ubuntu, so this approach should work on either of the two flavors. The key to ensuring specific local variables persist when you make use of sudo privileges is to make use of the env_keep directive. Rather than editing the /etc/sudoers file directly, I looked at its contents and realized that it includes files from the /etc/sudoers.d directory, so I created a new file specifically for the purpose of persisting specific local environment variables. I created a file at /etc/sudoers.d/env_vars with the following contents:

Defaults env_keep += "my_env_var_to_persist"

After doing that, I ran sudo -l to verify that the Defaults entry I added took effect and noticed a complaint about the access permissions on the new file I created. Since the message asserted that the permissions should be 0440 on the file, I quickly remedied the situation:

sudo chmod 0440 /etc/sudoers.d/env_vars

Once I did that, I ran sudo -l again, verified that the permissions on the new file were no longer an issue, and saw that my new env_keep directive was included among my Defaults entries when running with sudo permissions. Now, any time I set my_env_var_to_persist as a local environment variable, e.g.:

export my_env_var_to_persist='lodi dodi'

...when I make a subsequent call to a script or process with sudo, that environment variable persists and I can make use of it however I see fit. A nice simple example of this is calling sudo env. Try it for yourself and feel the magic!

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Keeping Idle SSH Sessions Alive on Ubuntu and Linux Minthttp://www.bernzilla.com/2013/12/20/keeping-idle-ssh-sessions-alive-on-ubuntu-and-linux-mint/
http://www.bernzilla.com/2013/12/20/keeping-idle-ssh-sessions-alive-on-ubuntu-and-linux-mint/http://www.bernzilla.com/2013/12/20/keeping-idle-ssh-sessions-alive-on-ubuntu-and-linux-mint/#commentsFri, 20 Dec 2013 18:33:31 GMT
As I mentioned here in the past, I've been using Linux more and more lately, and my flavor of choice is Linux Mint, which is a derivation of the very popular Ubuntu flavor. Very recently, I was "forced" by my cable Internet provider, henceforth referred to as "the worst company in the world," to upgrade my cable modem so that I could take advantage of recent improvements in their network speeds. Although I'm a strong believer in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and my old cable modem was getting the job done, I'm an even bigger sucker for speed, so I relented and set up the new modem when it arrived. Since then, whereas I had no problems with long idle SSH connections before, I have been experiencing lost connections and frozen terminal windows on a consistent basis.

By adding a ServerAliveInterval line to my SSH configuration file at /etc/ssh/ssh_config, I was able to specify an interval at which my SSH client would send a "keep alive" signal to the SSH server, thereby keeping the connection "active" even when actually idle. I went with a value of 180 for the ServerAliveInterval setting, meaning that I send a "keep alive" signal every three minutes, and that has worked well for my purposes.

My assumption is that something in the new modem I received from the worst company in the world more aggressively closes idle network connections in an attempt to keep the network running efficiently. Rather than spending many hapless hours on the phone with technical support reps who doubtless would have had no clue that this is what changed from the previous modem to the next, I went with a hunch and found a solid solution that will hopefully keep my idle SSH connections in business from here on forward.

With Facebook taking the lead with Graph Search and already cozying up to linguists and the like, it isn't that big of a stretch of the imagination to picture them getting into the speech recognition space themselves in the not-too-distant future.

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Even the Nonephemeral is Ephemeralhttp://www.bernzilla.com/2013/10/27/even-the-nonephemeral-is-ephemeral/
http://www.bernzilla.com/2013/10/27/even-the-nonephemeral-is-ephemeral/http://www.bernzilla.com/2013/10/27/even-the-nonephemeral-is-ephemeral/#commentsMon, 28 Oct 2013 05:07:53 GMT
I read an interesting thought from one of my favorite writers and bloggers, Clive Thompson, in an article over at Digiday titled The Internet Is Making You Smarter, Really:

Frankly, a lot of [what we do on the Internet each day] is going to vanish, and that's really tragic. A vast majority of stuff vanishes because companies go under. Geocities goes under, and everything is gone. When Facebook goes under -- and it will -- what's going to happen to all that stuff? The fact is that there's a huge amount of interesting culture out there that's going to die.